Expose Spring Boot Metrics with Prometheus and Visualize Them Using Grafana

First, add the Spring Boot Actuator dependency to the project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>

Then add the Prometheus client library:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.prometheus</groupId>
    <artifactId>simpleclient_spring_boot</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.26</version>
</dependency>

In the main application class ( Application.java) enable the required annotations:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnablePrometheusEndpoint
@EnableSpringBootMetricsCollector
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

Configure a default login for the actuator endpoints in application.yml:

security:
  user:
    name: user
    password: pwd

After starting the application, the Prometheus‑compatible metrics are available at /application/prometheus. Use the provided username and password to access them.

Next, set up Prometheus using Docker. Pull the image:

$ docker pull prom/prometheus

Create a prometheus.yml configuration file that scrapes the Spring Boot endpoint:

global:
  scrape_interval: 10s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  evaluation_interval: 10m
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: spring-boot
    scrape_interval: 5s
    scrape_timeout: 5s
    metrics_path: /application/prometheus
    scheme: http
    basic_auth:
      username: admin
      password: 123456
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["192.168.11.54:8099"]

Run the Prometheus container, mounting the configuration file:

docker run -d --name prometheus -p 9090:9090 \
    -v D:\test\actuator\prometheus\prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    prom/prometheus

Verify the service is up with docker ps and open http://localhost:9090/targets to see the Spring Boot scrape status.

Finally, install Grafana via Docker to visualize the metrics:

$ docker pull grafana/grafana1
$ docker run --name grafana -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana1

Log into Grafana (default admin/admin), add a Prometheus data source pointing to http://localhost:9090, and create dashboards to display the collected metrics.